Timothy Rice
Tim Rice recently retired after thirty years as a professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA. He specializes in the traditional music of the Balkans, especially from the Slavic-speaking nations of Bulgaria and Macedonia. In that field he is the author of May it Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago, 1994) and Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford, 2004) as well as numerous articles in major journals. In terms of research themes, he has written on musical cognition, politics and music, meaning and music, mass media, music teaching and learning, and theory and method in ethnomusicology, including a book entitled Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2014). He was founding co-editor of the ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music and co-edited Volume 8, Europe.
Tim has served the field of ethnomusicology in a variety of ways, including editing the journal Ethnomusicology (1981-1984), acting as President of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2003-2005), and serving on the Executive Board of the International Council for Traditional Music (2007-2013). At UCLA, Rice served as chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology, associate dean of the School of the Arts and Architecture, and inaugural director of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
In 2016, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (Bulgaria) awarded him the degree Doctor Honoris Causa for his contributions to Bulgarian music studies. His home department at UCLA recently sponsored a day-long symposium “Ethnomusicology in Theory and Practice” on May 19, 2017 in honor of Tim’s career.